Proactive Technologies Significant Discount Offer Announced in November Still Open Until December 15, 2016!

Proactive Technologies Inc. is extending a generous discount offer to manufacturing employers through December 15, 2016 ! It is our way to reach out to employers – both returning clients (mostly disrupted by the Crash of 2008) and newly interested contacts – with interest in exploring the power and benefits of a structured on-the-job training infrastructure, but may have been held back by budget realities.

Recently notices were emailed regarding this offer. Former clients received specific information describing, in brief, “where we left off” with their project, suggesting that they contact us to learn what little needs to be done to update and implement their program. This accelerated transfer of expertise™ approach is a tremendous offer without the discount, but with it can help any employer train the skilled workers they need and realize an increase in worker capacity, work quantity and quality and compliance while reducing the internal costs of training. New-hires and incumbent workers are driven to full job mastery and higher levels of return on worker investment (ROWI).

Understanding the Important Difference Between Classroom, Online and On-The-Job Training: Knowing the Difference Can Save Your Organization Time, Money and Disappointment

by Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

In the November, 2016 issue of Proactive Technologies Report article entitled, “10 Reasons Structured On-The-Job Training is a Vital and Necessary System for Any Organization” I laid out 10 very important reasons employers should seriously consider adding structured on-the-job training to their worker development strategy.This is based on the supposition that everyone’s definition of “on-the-job training” is similar if not the same, the difference between “structured” and “unstructured” on-the-job training is clear and recognized, and the vast difference between true structured on-the-job training and “classroom” or “online” learning is unquestioned. It also needs to be understood that structured on-the-job training is not interchangeable with classroom and online learning, but rather the “capstone” of applying core skills developed from the latter into mastering units of work for which an employer is willing to pay wages.

There are not many jobs available for which employers are recruiting people who have taken classes, or a lot of classes, as if that is where value lies. If one finds a job like this it is because the employer believes, legitimately or mistakenly, it has a strategy to cultivate those core skills into the performance of work tasks. A task is recognizable by a beginning point, and ending point and a series of steps that, when performed in the right order to the right specification, result in a recognizable and desired outcome. No employer hires people and pays them wages for “being good at math,” “reading exceptionally well,” being aware of safety rules.” Rather they are hoping those skills are current enough, and apply directly enough, to tasks that need to be mastered and work the needs to be done.

Still, if the collective content of all of the classes offered were effective alone in developing the workforce, why after 30 years do we skill have a “growing skill gap?” Ask any graduate what percentage of their 2 or 4-year education they use in the job and you will hear 10%, 20%…maybe more in highly structured disciplines such as law, medicine and engineering. Obviously something more is needed. For most, education is a foundation upon which to build (through training received on the job) higher order skills and master tasks that need to be done…if that training is available and deliberate.

To understand the importance of structured on-the-job training, it is important to differentiate between the three main types of learning in the workplace: classroom, online and on-the-job training. Classroom and online learning are pretty well understood as useful delivery methods in developing core skills that will be utilized later in mastering tasks they will be taught on-the-job and required to perform as the main reason for employment. However that is in no way a guarantee that either online learning and classroom learning – alone or combined – leads to mastery performance of a task without proper task training on how to apply those core skills in the performance of a unit of work; the task. If fact, if not correctly selected for job relevance (as opposed to industry acceptance), online and classroom content may have little impact on task performance and these core skills usually dissipate quickly without immediate and repetitive usage. Read More

Retiring Workers and the Tragic Loss of Intellectual Property and Value

The warnings went out over two decades ago. Baby Boomers were soon to retire, taking their accumulated expertise – locked in their brains – with them. But very little was done to address this problem. Call it complacency, lack of awareness of the emerging problem, preoccupation wit h quarterly performance, disinterest or disbelief, very few companies took action and the Crash of 2008 dispruted any meager efforts that were underway.

According to Steve Minter in an IndustryWeek Magazine article on April 10, 2012, “Only 17% of organizations said they had developed processes to capture institutional memory/organizational knowledge from employees close to retirement.” Who is going to train their replacements once they are gone? Would the learning curve of replacement workers be as long and costly, repeating the same learning mistakes, as the retiree’s learning curve? Would operations be disrupted and, if so, to what level?

“In our new “outsourcing nation,” a widely held belief is that employees are simply costs to be cut and not assets to be valued.” …. “Manufacturing faces a two-sided problem: it not only has thousands of people retiring, but it does not have the training programs to train skilled workers to replace them.”

A Strategy to Capture Tribal Knowledge

IndustryWeek- Michael Collins 5-23-16

In the last few years, it seems an alternative to the concentration of expertise in a few subject matter experts has become to use lower-wage temporary or contract workers who specialize in smaller quantities of processes, and who can be “traded-out” with a minimum amount of disruption. History will tell us just how costly that approach was and if anything was learned. Read More

Can’t Find The Right Workers? Why Not Train Workers To Your Own To Specification?

Dean Prigelmeier, President of Proactive Technologies, Inc.

According to a recent report by Career Builder.com, more than half of the employers surveyed could not find qualified candidates: 71% – Information-Technology specialists, 70% – Engineers, 66% – Managers, 56% – Healthcare and other specialists, 52% – Financial Operations personnel. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, nearly half of small and mid-size employers said they can find few or no “qualified applicants” for recent openings. And anecdotal evidence from manufacturing firms echoes the same challenge with specialty manufacturing jobs such as maintenance, NC machining and technical support positions. This, in large part, can be attributed to the upheaval caused by the Great Crash of 2008 and the following disruption of several million careers. Sidelined workers saw the erosion of their skill bases while waiting years for an economic recovery that, for many, has not reached them yet.

However, many or most of these workers can be “reskilled” or “upskilled” for the current workforce. The solution lies not in waiting for the labor market to magically produce the needed qualified candidates, but rather in each company investing a little to build their own internal system of structured on-the job training. With such an infrastructure, any candidate with strong core skills can be trained quickly and accurately to any employer’s specifications. Furthermore, a strong training infrastructure has factored into it methods of acceptable basic core skill remediation when the benefit outweighs the cost.

No matter how you examine it, an employer is responsible for training workers to perform the essential and unique tasks of the job for which they were hired. It is not economically feasible or practical for education systems to focus this sharply. Waiting for them to do so or allowing it to happen by osmosis is risky and costly for the employer, since every hour that passes is one more hour of wage for unproductive output. Add to that the hourly wage rate of the informal on-the-job training mentor/trainer efforts multiplied by the number of trainees and this becomes a substantial cost that should attract any manager’s attention.

Investment in a formal, deliberate structured on-the-job training system will cut internal costs of training substantially, raise each person’s worker capacity to where it is expected to be, improve output quality and quantity, and raise worker compliance – to processes, to quality standards and safety mandates. It simply makes business sense.

For more information, click here or attend one of the scheduled presentations.